At Chapel we are continuing our series on asking the question WHY? With a focus on asking helpful questions around faith and Christianity. Our question this week was why do we pray?
Prayer is one of those subjects that the more you read, the more you realise, there is so we don’t know or understand. There are so many different ways to pray, mediation prayers, repentance prayers, prayers for healing, you can pray scripture, you can pray walking, that’s just to name a few. You can pray with your eyes open or closed, out loud or in your head. But honestly, I don’t think that God is really concerned with how you pray. He just wants us to talk to him.
While it would be great if we could physically spend time with Jesus, we know this isn’t an option. It would be great to share a meal with him or catch up over coffee. Even when Jesus was here on the earth, he was preparing his disciples for the time when he would have to leave them.
In the gospel of John we read how Jesus met with his disciples and tried to explain to them what was about to happen. He knew he would have to leave them soon and that what he was about to do, would change the way they could communicate with God.
He tries to get them to understand how everything that belongs to his father, belongs to him. That when he leaves them and returns to his father, the father will send his Holy Spirit to them. Once this happens, Jesus said he would declare everything that is his, on to his people.
He explains “it’s better that I leave you, that I go back to be with my father as only then will he send his Spirit to be with you.”
Because of what Jesus did on the cross, we now have a restored relationship with our creator. We can now go to him with confidence and ask him for anything, knowing that he will deal with us with great compassion, mercy and grace.
We have the same access to God and the things of God, that Jesus does.
We pray because this how we talk to God and how he can talk to us.
Jeremiah 29:12 declares “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you” Psalm 34:17 says “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” Jeremiah 33:3 God tells us “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known”.
We pray because he hears us, we pray because he doesn’t leave us in our trouble, we pray because his Spirit brings revelation, reveals things, guides us, in ways we would never would have experienced or thought of, had we not stopped to make the time to pray.
So the question really is, why wouldn’t you pray.
Mrs Andrea Martin / Chaplain
